Astrobiologists are excited about what else they might find, Paul Davies gets to feel smug about his ‘shadow biosphere’ theory holding up, and space geeks everywhere who got a little overexcited at the NASA alert that “an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life” was to be announced this week get to feel a little deflated – no alien lifeforms just yet, simply more candidate planets to examine.

These are just the ones that pay homage to Agatha Christie

They’ll just have to unleash their thousands of SF novels hastily updated to include arsenic-metabolising lifeforms on the publishing houses now instead. Slush-piles of the world, beware!